Secular Humanism Greets the Seven Billionth Person

November 1, 2011

The surprising news is not that the world has reached seven
billion people. That figure was predicted many years ago. A different surprise
has emerged recently.

Looking further ahead, overpopulation in itself will not be
the world’s primary problem within another generation or so. In all likelihood,
within fifty years the urgent problem will be population decline across most of
the world.

Underpopulation will be discussed more than overpopulation, in many countries. The bad
news is that this trend toward future underpopulation won’t save the planet,
either. The planet won’t support eight
or nine billion people for long, as they consume remaining energy, water, and
soil resources. Secularism has been a large part of the helpful response to
overpopulation so far. Looking ahead, humanism must take the lead in preventing
disaster.

The efforts to reduce population using secular methods of
education and birth control that were set in place two generations ago have
largely worked. Families with only two children, or even just one child, are
now common throughout the world. If international family planning programs had
not been put in place during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, today’s world population
could now stand at 12 billion or more by some estimates. Doomsayers warning of
a demographic catastrophe forty years ago have been proven right. The
investments back then to reduce family size and lift families out of poverty
have paid off. Combating cultural ignorance and religious obstinacy has
resulted in better education for women and rising standards of living, which in
turn have cut fertility rates by half or more across nearly every developing
country.

We should pause to explain what this “fertility rate” refers
to. The total fertility rate of a country is the number of children born to an
average woman who (1) has the expected fertility rate of women her age in that
country, and (2) she survives from birth through the end of her reproductive
life. A related term, the “replacement” rate, is about 2.1 children, which is
the fertility rate required to keep a country’s population the same. Forty
years ago, the fertility rate across most of the world was above 5.0. The
current global average for fertility is at 2.5 children per woman, and that
number is dropping steadily. Europe’s fertility rate as a whole has dropped
below 1.8. China’s has dropped to 1.6. Japan’s is 1.3. Even India’s rate is
just 2.6 now and dropping fast. In about 20 or 25 years the global fertility
rate will fall below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. This has
never happened before in the history of civilization.

Europe has already begun a discussion of underpopulation
because not enough babies have been born to replace parents since the
mid-1970s, and many European countries will have 15% fewer people by 2030. Russia
and Japan are already depopulating and they will shrink about 20% or more by
2050. North Africa and the Middle East will grow slowly for another generation
before peaking and then falling. China’s population will stop growing and begin
shrinking around 2025, and its working labor force will begin shrinking earlier
by 2020. Brazil’s population will peak around 2040 and then decline. One third
of India’s states have already slowed their fertility rates below replacement
level, and by 2060 India will stop growing and begin to shrink. Only
Sub-Saharan Africa and North America is projected to keep growing past 2060.

The world’s population will gradually coast to a crest of
somewhere between eight and eleven billion people by 2100, depending on who you
ask. Even if the most draconian efforts to reduce fertility were imposed now,
the world population would still reach 8 and a half billion people, more or
less.

Humanism cannot endorse the most invasive methods of forced
population control. China enforces its one-child policy with inhumane policies
such as forced abortions, forced sterilizations, and property destruction. When
parents are left to make their own choice, they too often choose boys. Both
China and India are suffering from gender imbalances – some regions of India
and China see only 700 baby girls born for 1000 baby boys. That gender
imbalance will have disruptive demographic effects for the next generations.

The United Nations uses mathematical models to now predict
over ten billion people by 2100. However, the UN doesn’t take into account
famines, water shortages, epidemics, and wars. But we know those things will
happen. By neglecting real-world environmental factors, the UN’s mathematical models
forecast a billion more people in Africa by 2050 and 3.5 billion people total
in Africa by 2100. These numbers are highly unrealistic. The reality is that
Africa and other parts of the world will continue to lack the natural resources
to sustain that many people. Half of the world right now suffers from
inadequate nutrition. Yes, there was a green revolution during the 20th
century. What actually happened? The world went from three billion people total
to three billion malnourished people out of seven billion. A second green
revolution, now hailed as the rescue plan by optimists, would similarly leave
billions malnourished.

Many forecasters can’t figure out where the extra food and
water will come from to feed another three or four billion people, even under
the most optimistic assumptions about improved agricultural methods and
genetically engineered crops. Until fertile soil and fresh water can be
artificially manufactured as cheaply as plastic, people will starve, and more
of them will starve in the future. This pessimistic outlook is no reason to
stop trying to feed everyone. So long as more than just food is delivered, so
that families are content to only have two or three children, the world could
probably save these new people without pushing the world past nine billion
people total. The real question is what sorts of lives those people will be
able to live. Are we content to just save lives, but then leave them in
terrible poverty? And why should a small percentage of the world keep consuming
most of the planet’s resources?

Yes, there is an overpopulation crisis remaining today. But
it might not be where you were expecting.

There is no clear definition of overpopulation, since there
is no agreement on what constitutes an excess human being. Humanism doesn’t
help much at the outset. Simpler definitions of humanism rule out the very idea
of an “excess” human, since the absolute priority of human life gets top
billing in manifestos and declarations. But we could still talk about
preventing future possible humans.

Who would be the first excess human being? Wealth is
unevenly distributed to people around the world, and that humans busily produce
even more resources and promptly consume those resources. Earth has been able
to add six billion people over the last two hundred years to its first billion
people. The world has done this by dramatically increasing its consumption of
renewable and non-renewable energy resources, and by stressing and poisoning
the natural habitat, especially its animal life, the soil, the air, and the
planet’s waters.

Overpopulation only exists within an environmental context –
overpopulation is about the long-term sustainability of humans in their
habitats. Are we paying enough attention to sustainability?

Unfounded warnings about overpopulation date back to Thomas
Malthus, and well-founded warnings have been clearly sounded since World War
II. The more taboo subject is instead overconsumption. It is not hard to
observe plenty of evidence of overconsumption. If everyone on the planet
consumed as much as the typical Canadian or American, the earth’s environments
would be quickly destroyed. That’s an overconsumption problem, not an
overpopulation problem. Put another way, if there is an overpopulation problem,
that problem is quite local.

It takes more than 16 people in India to out-consume an
American like me. If we took overconsumption seriously, we could arrive at the
judgment that it is better for the planet to add 16 babies in India than one
more American baby. That’s one way to address the overconsumption problem
behind overpopulation. It wouldn’t work, though, because many of those children
in India are going to grow up as part of India’s growing middle class, who will
consume more and more like Americans with each passing decade.

If the middle classes of India and China were to even reach
just one-quarter of the economic status as an average American, the resulting
consumption of natural resources would exhaust the planet very quickly. The
damage to the atmosphere would be even worse. An average American’s “carbon
footprint” is 15 times greater than an Indian’s right now. If the people of
India, or China, were burning fossils fuels more like Americans, greenhouse
gases would be beyond all control.

Here’s another way to answer the overpopulation problem:
Simply declare that few people on the planet should consume as much as us, and
most people should consume much less than us. This doesn’t sound very
humanistic, but that’s the actual policy of first-world countries. They
negotiate international trade agreements and design global capitalist markets
to ensure that the richest on the planet continue to consume as much as they
can. That doesn’t seem fair to some people. Maybe that’s quite unjust according
to humanism. But humanism is not running the world nowadays.

Humanism does support adequate food for everyone, of course.
However, dismissing overpopulation as merely a problem of redistribution is
both profoundly right and profoundly wrong. Yes, everyone on the planet can be
adequately fed in world of egalitarian distribution. But no, that distribution
system will never exist, because the current capitalist system will not be
replaced, and no one will pay the immense costs of equitably distributing food
instead. The countries with the most purchasing power will continue to buy up
most of the food, and price others out of the market. Most of the rest of the
world’s transportable resources are similarly priced by international markets,
and that will not change anytime soon. Poorer countries will continue to have
difficulty feeding their populations, since most are net importers of food
despite the agricultural revolution of the past three decades. Rising
populations in those countries will only make food and water problems worse.

Yes, overpopulation will keep looking like a problem to be
solved by redistribution. However, large countries will only be focusing on the
distribution of wealth within their countries, not on sending it away to other
countries. And the overconsumption problem will only get worse if wealthy
countries try to encourage larger families to prevent population decline.

It is even more utopian to simply say that overpopulation is
just a temporary problem for future technologies to soon solve. Unless we are
all uploaded into the super-computer Singularity within 50 years, there
probably will not be a new power source capable of largely replacing the
consumption of oil and gas and coal around the world within this century. And
that power source won’t also be cleaning up the oceans and replacing all its
fish, or replenishing lost soils, or moving fresh water between continents.

The bad news about overpopulation is that famine and
malnutrition will remain a severe problem for the poor, and overconsumption by
wealthy countries will make matters much worse. The worst degradations to the
earth lie immediately ahead during this century, not the 22nd century.
Humanists hoping for science’s rescue within this century will be largely
disappointed. The planet is being consumed to death too quickly. And the
richest countries are leading the way, as they always have.

What Does Humanism Have To Do With Overpopulation?

Humanism in general promises a universalizable social ethics
for guiding humanity’s earthly welfare. Social structures such as economic and
political systems must answer to this humanist social ethics.

More specifically, humanism stands for valuing life, human
rights, justice for all, and government that promotes opportunity for everyone.
Because humanism values life in all its diversity, humanistic environmentalism
is not a contradiction is terms. Balancing human needs with environments is not
a problem that humanism can avoid. There are varieties of humanism which can
potentially accomplish this balance. But taking them seriously won’t happen
until we realize how Enlightenment humanism is now hopelessly inadequate. It
was designed for a phase of civilization that has passed into history and will
not return.

Enlightenment humanism, roughly from John Locke to Jeremy
Bentham, constructed the ideal liberal government for protecting the natural
goodness of civil life. Enlightenment humanism prospered under European
conditions of growing populations, increased productivity, and national
prosperity. Enlightenment humanism fostered things like mercantile capitalism
with its support for individual property rights, the right of labor to seek
work wherever it can, capitalist markets liberated from feudal systems and protected
by legal systems, and governments prioritizing the social welfare of their
populations. The liberated individual was viewed as the warm engine of progress
as well as the bright light of reason. Modern humanism inherited this liberal
concern for valuing and protecting every person.

Ethics proposes ideals, but nature deals out its own
reality. Ecology can predict what naturally happens when an omnivore species is
fed enough and has no natural predators. A deliberate plan to let the earth
overpopulate could not do better than apply selected ethical principles from
Enlightenment humanism: individual human values are supreme; every human life
is a life worth saving; after the right to life, property rights are paramount;
having offspring is an exclusively parental matter; everyone should have an
opportunity to raise their standard of living as high as they can; governments
should deliver rising economic prosperity to the people, and the like.

Those 18th century humanist institutions mutated far beyond
any foreseeable dimensions by the mid-20th century. As republican
constitutionalism evolved into mass democracy, it transcended civic virtue and
community values. Mass democracies demand that governments ensure ever higher
standards of living, and voters punish governments for letting economies
stumble. As capitalism grew into a global financial web with a life of its own,
it also passed beyond humanistic control. Capitalism only needs selfishly
rational producers and consumers to perpetuate itself, and immense financial
powers try to control governments rather than the other way around. Just like
individuals, countries will keep borrowing and amass huge debts just to
maintain an expected standard of living.

Both high-finance capitalism and mass democracy are
excellent short-term deliberators: immediate conditions right now dominate
thinking, and only the next few years, at most, are taken seriously. Immediate
consumption is our obsession. The consequences for the planet are obvious.

Are there any new humanisms to help prevent those
consequences from getting worse? Some varieties won’t do much at all. For
example, there are plenty of personal humanists focused on their own lives, who
are heard to say that humanism is just a lifestyle, and not something pointing
to any specific political or global agenda. Lifestyle humanism takes for
granted the Enlightenment framework of rights permitting their consumptive
lifestyles.

Progressive humanists have a bigger agenda, by focusing on
social and political reforms to expand domestic rights and liberties.
Progressive humanism is also taking for granted the first-world context of
abundant wealth and opportunity and just concerns itself with appropriate
domestic distribution. The atheist agenda of resisting religion isn’t the
solution to overpopulation or overconsumption, either. People leaving religion
is not considered by demographers as a large effect on population changes.
While highly secular countries saw fertility reductions sooner, their higher
standards of living mostly accounts for this effect.Almost all Catholic and Muslim countries now
have dramatically falling fertility rates too. For example, Iran’s fertility
rate dropped from around seven to 1.8 in the last thirty years.

These three sorts of humanisms that I have mentioned –
lifestyle humanism, progressive humanism, and anti-religious atheism -- are still
moving on inertia remaining from Enlightenment humanism. None of them will be
much use for dealing with overpopulation and overconsumption. They can even
look pretty hypocritical if they try to tell the rest of the world how many
babies to have. Humanists in rich countries offering their calculations about
how poorer countries should limit their family sizes and energy consumption are
not very different from global financiers dictating how poorer countries should
run their economies. Who is really benefitting from poor countries restricting
growth while wealthy countries can have whatever populations they want?

Is there anything salvageable in the humanist tradition to
construct a planetary ethics that prioritizes global sustainability in a just
manner? Enlightenment humanism was made obsolete when its core premise was
proven wrong: that civil life is naturally good if it is sufficiently
liberated, fed, productive, and protected. This premise had a built-in
assumption – an unlimited amount of fresh natural resources. But the 20th
century demonstrated how limited and fragile the planet’s ecological resources
are. At a global scale, we have about reached that practical limit.

The liberation of civil life is not naturally good, not at a
planetary scale with so great a human population. Ethical theory reminds us how
our situation has become a tragedy of the commons. With everyone feeling free
to take as much as they can for themselves, there will be little left for
future generations.

Humanism must become ecological: its premises about what is
good for human life must take into account the sciences telling us how
excessive consuming populations burden and exhaust the planet. Ecological
humanism is the great leap forward from Enlightenment humanism. We need more
eco-humanism and less ego-humanism. Ecological humanism has an answer to that
provocative question, who are the excess human beings? The humanist answer is
that there are no excess human beings, but only excessive people not yet part
of the ecological and sustainable future that the world deserves. Don’t look
around elsewhere – look more closely at yourself.

Humanists are friends to all life. Humanism cannot approve
of any policies that fail to take care of living people. Humanists are not
Mathusians who disapprove of charity and food for the poor. Humanists are not
social Darwinists who disapprove of lifting people out of ignorant poverty into
educated productivity. Humanists are not anti-technology Luddites dreaming of
some innocent natural utopia. Humanists will always favor helpful technological
advances for humanity and they will always advocate educated productivity for
everyone. Ecological humanism demands that consumers spend their money on
things that do not destroy the environment and do help sustain the planet for
the next century and beyond.

Wealthy countries do not have to abruptly slash their income
orof living so long as their
productivity and consumption is far more sustainable and makes investments in
the future. People should spend money on foods that do not deplete the soils,
fresh waters, and oceans. People should spend for the consumption of renewable
energy rather than fossil fuels. People should spend more on electronics and
machinery that use energy efficiently rather than outdated machinery. People
should spend far more on developing the new technologies that everyone on the
planet can use without further damaging the environment. All that re-directed
spending of wealth would make an enormous positive impact on the world. There’s
no lack of labor or of wealth in an ecological economy. Its not wealth that’s
the problem – it is how that wealth is created, and how that wealth is spent.
There are many social agendas and political movements that offer green and
sustainable paths for the planet into the future. Humanists should join these
sorts of movements, whichever ones they judge are the most worthy.

I have no specific green platform to endorse. This essay is
about humanism and overpopulation. Humanism offers a universalizable social
ethics for guiding humanity’s earthly welfare. We need to worry less about raw
numbers of populations and worry more about sustainable populations. If
humanism can realize its pioneering vision of caring concern for all of humanity,
dedication to equal opportunity for every person, and commitment to a world
habitable for future generations, then it can evolve into a truly planetary
humanism. If humanists today are a vital part of that social evolution, we may
deserve posterity’s kind judgment upon us.

Comments:

#1 SocraticGadfly (Guest) on Friday November 04, 2011 at 9:49pm

Add in the fact that many of the world’s countries with some of the highest birthrates are countries with large fundamentalist Muslim majorities; not to go all neocon, but it’s an additional reason for concern.

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John Shook is Director of Education and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry–Transnational in
Amherst, N.Y., and Research Associate in Philosophy at the
University at Buffalo, since 2006. He has
authored and edited more than a dozen books, is a co-editor of three
philosophy journals, and travels for lectures and debates across the United
States and around the world.